Becoming Brothertown

Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World

Craig N. Cipolla

Publication Year: 2013

Histories of New England typically frame the region’s Indigenous populations in terms of effects felt from European colonialism: the ravages of epidemics and warfare, the restrictions of reservation life, and the influences of European-introduced ideas, customs, and materials. Much less attention is given to how Algonquian peoples actively used and transformed European things, endured imposed hardships, and negotiated their own identities. In Becoming Brothertown, Craig N. Cipolla searches for a deeper understanding of Native American history. Covering the eighteenth century to the present, the book explores the emergence of the Brothertown Indians, a "new" community of Native peoples formed in direct response to colonialism and guided by the vision of Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian and ordained Presbyterian minister. Breaking away from their home settlements of coastal New England during the late eighteenth century, members of various tribes migrated to Oneida Country in central New York State in hopes of escaping East Coast land politics and the corrupting influences of colonial culture. In the nineteenth century, the new community relocated once again, this time to present-day Wisconsin, where the Brothertown Indian Nation remains centered today. Cipolla combines historical archaeology, gravestone studies, and discourse analysis to tell the story of the Brothertown Indians. The book develops a pragmatic approach to the study of colonialism while adding an archaeological perspective on Brothertown history, filling a crucial gap in the regional archaeological literature.

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

As with the conclusion of any long-term, labor-intensive project,
one naturally looks back to when it began to take stock of just how much
happened in the intervening years. In the case of this project, I feel like an
altogether different person than the one who began this research in 2006 and
committed to writing this book in 2010. ...

2. Pragmatism and the Archaeology of Colonial Ethnogenesis

In writing the letter excerpted in the epigraph, Joseph Johnson—
then a nascent leader in the Brothertown movement—aspired to raise
funds for his school among the Tunxis Indians of Farmington, Connecticut.
Like all people enmeshed in colonial contexts, Johnson continually refashioned
his identity in relation to the “foreign” peoples, ...

3. Brothertown Histories

So wrote Thomas Commuck from mid-nineteenth-century Brothertown,
Wisconsin. Only three decades before, Commuck—a Narragansett
Indian—first joined the Brothertown community in their New York settlement
just as they were preparing for their next move west. ...

4. Brothertown Writing: Peopling the Place, Placing the People

As described, Occom saw Brotherton, or “Brothertown” as it came to be
known, simply as place rather than as an identity. For him, the newly formed
body politic was exactly that—a community linked by shared religious
views and approaches to the politics of colonial North America—rather than
an emergent ethnic group. ...

5. Commemoration in the Northeast

Hardship and change were all too familiar for Aaron Poquiantup.
He was born a Niantic Indian among the tumult of postrevolutionary
New England and spent his childhood and much of his teenage life as part
of the Christian Indian communities of coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island. ...

6. Commemoration in Wisconsin

Hannah Dick’s grave sits in a small cemetery in the northwest corner
of Brothertown, Wisconsin, adjacent to the lot where she spent the last
twenty-one years of her life. It is the only Brothertown cemetery bounded by
stone walls reminiscent of the vernacular architecture of New England. ...

7. Spatial Practices at Brothertown

In an effort that ultimately led them to current-day Wisconsin,
the Brothertown Indians sought out yet another new communal land base
in the early nineteenth century. As outlined in chapter 3, they first looked
to present-day Indiana, writing the letter quoted above to the leaders of a
multitribal community then residing in the area ( Jarvis 2010). ...

8. Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Colonial Culture and Native American Identity Politics

Nearly two and a half centuries have passed since Samson
Occom began questioning his people’s place in coastal New England, since
members of several local tribes gathered at Mohegan to discuss their uncertainties
about the future, and since Joseph Johnson went to Oneida in
search of a new homeland. ...

References

Index

About the Author

Craig Cipolla received his PhD in anthropology from the
University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and is currently a lecturer at the University
of Leicester, where he holds a Marie Curie Research Fellowship
and directs both the Centre for Historical Archaeology and the Master’s
Program in Historical Archaeology. ...

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